Ram Mohan Roy

Raja Ram Mohan Roy (22 May 1772 – 27 September 1833) was a founder of the Brahma Sabha the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a socio-religious reform movement in India.

Quotes

• Truth and Virtue do not necessarily belong to wealth and Power and Distinctions of Big Mansions.
  • Quoted from Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 8 ISBN 9788185990354

• The editor perhaps may consider himself justified by numerous precedents among the several partisans of different Christian sects in applying the name of heathen to one who takes the Precepts of Jesus as his principal guide in matters of religious and civic duties; as Roman Catholics bestow the appellation of heretics or infidels on all classes of Protestants; and the Protestants do not spare the title idolater to Roman Catholics; Trinitarians deny the name Christian to Unitarians, while the latter retort by stigmatising the worshippers of the son of man as Pagans who adore a created and dependent being.
  • His reply after being called a heathen by John Marshman. Quoted from Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 8 ISBN 9788185990354

• Ram Mohun replied by writing a satire in Bengali, Padari Sisya Sambad, published in 1823, in order to ridicule the doctrine of Trinity. It was an imaginary dialogue between a European missionary and his three Chinese students. After having taught the dogma, the missionary asked his students whether God was one or many. “The first disciple replied that there were three Gods, the second that there were two and the third that there was no God. The teacher rebuked them and demanded an explanation of their answers. The first one said, ‘You said that there are God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. According to my counting that is one plus one plus one, making three.’ The second one said, ‘You told us that there were three Gods and that one of them died long ago in a village in a Western country. So I concluded that there are two Gods, now living.’ The third one said, ‘You have said again and again that God was one and that there is no other God and Christ is the real God. But about 1800 years have passed since the Jews, living near the Arabian Sea, crucified him. What else, do you think I can say, Sir, except that there is no God.’”
  • Padari Sisya Sambad Quoted from Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 8 ISBN 9788185990354

• Roy’s resentment of Christians as ‘persons who travel to a distant country for the purpose of overturning the opinions of its inhabitants and introducing their own’.
  • quoted in Tom Holland - Dominion_ The Making of the Western Mind-Little, Brown (2019)
  • Ghazi, Abidullah Al-Ansari: Raja Rammohun Roy: An Encounter with Islam and Christianity and the Articulation of Hindu Self-Consciousness (Iqra, 2010) page 51

About Roy

• It is only when we move to modem times that we find the first traces of sarva-dharma-samabhâva surfacing in India in the form of the Brahmo Samaj. Raja Ram Mohun Roy, the founder of this cult, was a votary of Islamic monotheism, and later on became infatuated with Jesus Christ. He confused the monism of the Upanishads with the monotheism of Biblical creeds, and gave birth to a lot of confusion. But, by and large, he stayed a Hindu who had some very hard words to say about the doings of Islam and Christian missionaries in India...
  • S. R. Goel, Preface, in Goel, Sita Ram (ed.) (1998). Freedom of expression: Secular theocracy versus liberal democracy.

• On child marriage, he clearly believed that the age of marriage for women should be increased and women should get the right of remarriage. In a true sense, he was the architect of Modern India and the father of Bengal Renaissance.
  • Jagdeep Dhankhar.[1]